Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵
DOGE was not a money-saving effort. It was an effort to chase down and prove right-wing conspiracy theories. They went after USAID to prove conspiracy theories about foreign aid. Then they went after SSA to, again, pursue conspiracy theories about Dems paying "illegals" to vote. 1/2
Musk's people infiltrated the GSA technology arm early on and demanded root-level access to computer systems, trying to circumvent normal security procedures. Here's one example where they pushed so hard they forced someone to resign rather than give in. Why did they do this?
www.404media.co
One possible motivation to demand access was to steal data, and I think that was a part of it, but also I think DOGE (or Musk, anyway) was motivated by a conspiracy theory: The belief that government workers would conspire to use the government's computer systems against them. They thought we, being radical leftists apparently, would put a "DOGE sucks" type of message onto government websites or into government communication systems My evidence for that: the right did exactly this to government websites. So they were projecting what they planned to do onto us.
Partisan messages like this violate the Hatch Act and, as nonpartisan civil servants sworn to uphold the law, we would never do this. But conspiracy-brained people don't know we truly uphold the law, and in this case probably don't even know the law at all. My group's firing appears to have been a consequence of a right-wing article from 2023 calling us, and I quote, "a cabal of perpetually triggered leftists obsessed with politics and pronouns" The article echoed around Twitter until Musk saw it, tweeted we were "deleted" which DOGE then implemented 18F was liquidated at midnight and our website deleted at the same moment, apparently to end our leftist conspiracy. In general DOGE appeared quite preoccupied with the idea that websites, mass emails, etc controlled by longtime government employees would be used to conspire against them. Before we were fired, we were interrogated. This had a very Office Space "so what would you say you do here" vibe, appearing to assume that government employees are ineffective, our systems broken. They kept announcing things like "performance standards" as though we didn't already have them:
www.opm.gov
I think the right-wing conspiracy active here is quite old and mundane: the belief that government is full of freeloaders, or full of leftists which are the same thing As you can see, we all had "lower productivity jobs in the public sector" and a presumed lazy desire for extended vacation
Although DOGE occasionally pretended to modernize some computer system, the only non-vaporware changes to software they ever oversaw (mostly they didn't write the code themselves, just leaned on someone else to do so) were to remove "DEI" stuff from government websites I've taken a deep dive into the DOGE bro's open source software code commits to verify they never wrote (or even oversaw) any code beyond culture war messaging. It's all trivial stuff like this: taking out the "nonbiary" option on some form.
I don't think I have to explain that hunting down every instance of "LGBTQ" and "nonbinary" from all government software is the result of a homophobic conspiracy theory. It's not subtle. They also hunted down all grants that went to any purpose containing "LGBTQ" or similar words. I think it is pretty clear this is the brainchild of a conspiracy theorist who wants to "follow the money" to find out how the imaginary cabal of perpetually triggered leftists gets funded.
The majority of DOGE's "work" is to use LLMs to search federal grants for the keywords "LGBTQ," "BIPOC," and similar, and then to cancel those grants. They are targeting minorities in the most literal, automated way. The outcomes of this are all over their own website:
Everything that DOGE touched, they added visible evidence of their assumption that there is a real live DEI conspiracy which can be fought with lawyers and funding cuts Here it is at the top of the DOJ Civil Rights Division website
DOGE stole the phrase "waste, fraud, and abuse" from government regulations, where it is used to prohibit corrupt contracts, and inverted its meaning: They use it to mean a leftist conspiracy imagined to engage in the financial corruption that DOGE is actually doing by self-dealing gov contracts Anyway, this is just my experience as a software engineer; I haven't even touched the stuff DOGE did to public health or foreign aid. But from a distance it looks pretty clearly motivated by the same swirl of anti-government, anti-minority conspiracy theories. They're not esoteric. Any of the conspiracy theories that shaped DOGE's mission can be found easily by browsing Twitter or Facebook for a few minutes. Apparently billionaire brains get cooked by social media in exactly the same way poor people brains do. Did you really read this whole long thread? Wow! Go spread the word: DOGE isn't actually over.
The "DOGE is gone" articles are clickbait but this one gets it closer to the truth: DOGE is not gone, it just claims to have "no centralized leadership" anymore -- in other words, its leadership is hiding in an attempt to avoid blame.
www.nextgov.com